Conventionally television receivers are provided with a channel selecting apparatus for selecting broadcast signals received from a prescribed broadcast station from those received through an antenna from a plurality of broadcast stations. Some of the channel selecting apparatus have a plurality of regular channels associated with respective broadcast stations and are equipped with a selector for selecting received broadcast signals from a corresponding prescribed broadcast station by selecting one regular channels, an instruction key for generating an operating instruction to the selector by operating the instruction key, a storage device for storing a plurality of regular channel data associated with the respective regular channels, and a controller for controlling the operation of the selector by reading the regular channel data of the storage device based on the operating instruction from the instruction key and referring to this regular channel data.
The instruction key has a remote controller. This remote controller is provided with twelve channel selection keys, a channel shift-up key and a channel shift-down key all of which are manually controlled.
Each of the channel selection keys is assigned with a number corresponding to the regular channels. For instance, when selecting a desired channel, the channel selection key assigned the number corresponding to the desired channel is pushed. The operating instruction generated by pushing this channel selection key is given to the control means.
The channel shift-up key and the channel shift-down key are used for sequentially shifting the channels. Whenever the channel shift-up key is manually pushed, the operating instruction is given to the control means to switch the currently selected channel to a channel which is set at the upstream side as shown in FIG. 1. On the contrary, whenever the channel shift-down key is manually pushed, the operating instruction is given to the control means to switch the currently selected channel sequentially to the channels which are set at the downstream side.
In recent years, many broadcast stations have been put into operation, for instance, for satellite broadcasting, CATV and the like, and many broadcasting programs are provided. With the increase in broadcast stations, it has been demanded to make it more simple to select a desired broadcast station.
To satisfy the above requirement, it is considered necessary to provide additional channel selection keys corresponding to increased channels to a remote controller of a channel selecting apparatus. However, the increase of channel selection keys makes the size of a remote controller large. Furthermore, the operability of a remote controller can be deteriorated if the number of the channel selection keys is increased.
Instead of the channel selection keys, some remote controllers are provided with a ten-key pad for entering channel numbers. However, it is not possible to select a desired channel only by one operation and their operability is inferior to the channel selection key.
As described above on such a conventional channel selecting apparatus, if the number of channel selection keys increases in consonance with the increase of broadcast stations, a remote controller, etc. will become large in size and its operability will be deteriorated.